


Things Bert Did

by lickmymccracken



Series: bandom trans headcanons [4]
Category: My Chemical Romance, The Used
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Depression, Drug Abuse, Drug Use, Gen, Intersex Character, M/M, intersex! bert, mention of mental hospital, mention of self harm, mention of suicide, semi-platonic realtionship, serious lack of dialogue honestly i suck, trans boy! bert, transgender character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-13 00:36:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3361277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lickmymccracken/pseuds/lickmymccracken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>cafab intersex trans!bert and possibly asexual! Gerard, but thats a subjective thing.<br/>!!!!!PLEASE read tags for possible triggers!!!!!</p><p>"There was something different between needing Bert, and needing Bert to need him. It was all wrong and dangerous and full of self-destruction, but it was beautiful and tragic and it worked."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things Bert Did

                Gerard didn’t know he needed a Bert in his life until he had one. And he didn’t need a Bert when he had one but fuck if you had told him to throw Bert out on his ass he would have punched you in the mouth. There was something different between needing Bert, and needing Bert to need him. It was all wrong and dangerous and full of self-destruction, but it was beautiful and tragic and it worked.

                Bert was in school for all of three months before he seemingly dropped off the face of the planet. He was in the center of attention everywhere, even when in the back of classrooms or in alcoves of the hallway, his name was in everyone’s mouth. He was all too loud and abrasive and in your face, or small and turned in on himself like there was a black hole sprouting out of his chest. There was never an in between, even when Gerard got to know him and spent all of his free time around him. He was at full power or completely shut down and it was terrifying, but Gerard had never met someone else like him. Someone so completely one or the other. Except for one thing.

                Bert was born with the wrong bits. He explained it that god decided to start fucking him right in the womb (as to get a head start on fucking him for the rest of his life) so he gave him a little bit of both bits for maximum fuck-age. His words exactly. Bert explained it that way when he was all the way on, when he was off, he told Gerard he was intersex at birth, which meant he was born with “ambiguous genitalia” (he said this with harsh air quotes) and his parents and a doctor thought he should be a girl, which he wasn’t. So he didn’t let them make him a girl.

\---

                When Bert disappeared from school, Gerard heard about it from everyone else first. There were the rumors of course; people saying that he joined a cult, got sent to juvy, or jail, or a catholic school. None of them seemed improbable to someone who had never met him. Gerard had never said a word to Bert until a month after he left school, when he found Bert hanging out on the street that Gerard drove home on every day. Literally in the middle of the street, sitting cross-legged petting a stray cat. Obviously Gerard put on his hazard lights, applied his breaks, and got out. It’s not like he was going to drive through the guy.

                After staring for a while, Gerard shouted something along the lines of “Dude what the hell are you doing in the middle of the street?” along with something about it being dangerous. After around 50 seconds Bert picked his head up and shrugged, the cat walked away, Bert stood up. Gerard just stood there kind of awkwardly because he was definitely expecting some sort of response other than that.

                He stuttered out an apology just loud enough to reach the 10 foot gap between them. The air felt weird, like it wasn’t moving at all. As if the world had stopped turning for the few minutes they spoke. Gerard licked hi lips and waited for him to talk like his words were honey dripping off a spoon.

                “For what?” Bert asked. He had a leaf in his hair, either stuck from laying on the ground or placed there purposely. It stuck out weirdly like some leaf-shaped horn coming out of his head, or the way a girl would wear a flower freshly picked. The stark difference between those two thoughts seemed almost perfect. Bert stared at Gerard like he was bored.

                “The cat left, um. Do you need a ride somewhere?” It seemed like the courteous thing to do. Someone just sitting in the middle of the street, you would think maybe they should be somewhere else. Bert shrugged and walked to Gerard’s car without much of a second thought or glance to Gerard. Gerard turned off the hazards and fastened his seat belt and started the car. He drove 5 blocks before looking at Bert at a stop sign.

                “Don’t you go to my school? Beth right? Where do you live?” The name was like acid flicked on Bert’s face but he only twitched up a smile on the corner of his mouth and put his mud stained sneakers on the dashboard. Gerard drove his mom’s car since she was working from home most days and she never let him or his little brother put their feet on the dashboard.

                “It’s Bert actually, and I don’t go there anymore.  I’m pursuing a more fulfilling career path.” Bert dropped his feet off the dash and twisted around in his seat to get a good look at Gerard. “You smoke? You look like a smoker.” Gerard opened his mouth to say he only smoked on the weekends and not in his mom’s car because she would kill him, but closed it without saying any of that and nodded. Bert cracked a bigger smile that made something twist in Gerard’s stomach like when you’re in a haunted house waiting for something to jump out at you. Bert said, “Cool, you know where Cedar Park is? Take me there.”

\-----

                Gerard started seeing Bert more often, and eventually brought him back to his house.

                Bert’s family was big and went to church. Bert had 3 sisters and 2 brothers and his parents didn’t always notice when he didn’t come home for days. He said that they kicked him out after he left school but he stayed there anyway. His parents worked but Bert couldn’t tell you exactly what they did. His mom crossed herself a lot, and made late night whispered calls to telephone pastors and advice lines. Bert said 80% of the time she talked about him and he listened on the other line while she whimpered about drinking whine the week she got pregnant and smoking in college and how she must have done something wrong for God to have done this to her child.

                 Bert came into Gerard’s home like a house cat and settled in. He gave Bert dinner and a sweatshirt. He showed Bert a comic he was working on and his favorite B-list movie. He let Bert lay across his bed with his shoes on. Bert gave Gerard a small bag of coke the way a cat gives its’ owner a bird it killed. Gerard held it in closed hands as if there were hidden cameras in his room that had just turned on him.

                “Where did you get coke, Bert, what the hell?” He hissed, sitting next to Bert on the bed so that their hips were flush. There were flakes of dried mud from Bert’s shoes on his sheets. Bert took the bag from him and unzipped the seal.

                “I know a guy, don’t you want some?” He asked, dipping a finger in his mouth, then the bag, then his mouth again. He looked up at Gerard whose face was registered shock and amusement. Casual offerings of illicit drugs were something you saw in PSAs and Crime Drama shows. Bert knew a guy.

                “I don’t…. really do hard drugs, but… If you wanna do it go ahead.” He sat next to him while Bert rubbed more of it on his gums, and closed the bag. He gave it back to Gerard and said he got it for him, “If you change your mind I want you to have it.”

                “I mean I really appreciate it,” Gerard stared down at the baggie in his hand and put it in his pocket, then changed his mind and put it under his mattress instead, where it stayed for months on end. “When did you start doing coke?” He asked. Gerard knew Bert smoked a lot of pot, but anything harder than that he didn’t know anything about. It was something new to add to his mental file of Things Bert Did, like bite at the skin around his fingernails until there was blood, or kept rocks and pens in his pockets.

                “When I was 16, but it’s not like an all the time thing. It’s just for special occasions.” And then he went and rifled through Gerard’s movies and books, just like that. Bert talked about things as if nothing was of importance. Everything was casual conversation and common knowledge, words let out into open space for anyone to know. It was scary to Gerard, who didn’t have many secrets but couldn’t imagine letting them out for everyone to know. He put on another movie when Gerard came back, and put his arm around Bert just to see what would happen.

                When Bert left he kissed him on the corner of the mouth, and said thank you to his mother.

 

\-----

 

                The year Gerard graduated Bert was sent away. Rumors flew: he tried to kill himself, he tried to kill someone else, he was selling drugs to the middle schoolers, he took acid and went insane, and he had been having an affair with one of the teachers for months. Gerard waited for truth, because he knew Bert wouldn’t stay away for long.

                A while back Bert had told Gerard that he was going to sew himself to Gerard’s arm, so he could never get rid of him and Gerard told him that was a really cool concept for a horror movie and held his hand for an hour. Bert wrote his name on Gerard’s wall near his bed in an orange sharpie so that he could be there all the time.

                The truth was that Bert had started doing meth a month and a half ago and had a “psychotic episode”. He was in a hospital somewhere for a month until he came home with a medical dog tag and plastic hospital bracelet. He told Gerard that it wasn’t a psychotic episode, he just wanted to scare his parents and tried to swallow the barrel of a gun. He told Gerard about how the orderlies in the hospital fucked each other in the bathrooms when they thought no one was around, and how there was a really cool girl like him who braided his hair, and about the old women on the floor above him who he convinced that he was possessed by the devil. He told Gerard they tried to diagnose him with bipolar disorder and manic depression with a voice like an old English doctor and then laughed about it. Gerard knew Bert was put in a girls’ ward without him saying it.

                Bert slept for 2 days straight in Gerard’s bed and when he woke up he whispered that he missed him every second he was in there. He told Gerard that he told someone that he was Gerard’s boyfriend. Gerard kissed him on the mouth and cried in his shoulder. “Don’t fucking do that again, Bert, don’t fucking leave like that, you asshole.”

\-----

                When Gerard went to college, of course Bert followed. Gerard rented an apartment off campus and Bert hung around every other week. He had his own one man parties and let Gerard join in on the weekends. Gerard got around to trying to coke Bert gave him, but stuck to his booze and pot. He held Bert’s waist and danced to shitty pop music, he kissed Bert on the mouth and on the neck and on the cheek and the forehead. He spun him around until they were gasping for air and Bert’s smile was so wide it was painful to see. He spilled red wine on his shirt and on the carpet. He left the windows open and got complaints from neighbors. He took Bert’s hand when he reached for more and more and more of anything and twirled him until the room spun and he went back for more. He didn’t look at the words scratched into Bert’s hips long enough to read them.

                When Bert got back into meth he didn’t have a “psychotic episode”. He never looked at a gun again. He laid on his stomach and let Gerard draw him, draw on him. He fell asleep for minutes at a time and melted into Gerard’s side with a loose-lipped smile. Bert put his hand in Gerard’s lap, in his jeans, up his shirt, whimpering a please, an apology, a need to repay, and Gerard moved it away, pulled it away, whispered that Bert was high and it wasn’t okay. He kissed him until he forgot and held him until he was asleep. Bert drew in permanent marker on Gerard’s arms and wrote a poem on his stomach. He was slow and even and sweet like molasses. He fell into Gerard’s bed and told him he loved him until he fell asleep and Gerard turned out the lights.

                It was a perfect paradox of wrong and perfect that worked better than anyone could believe.

**Author's Note:**

> please if you notice anything remotely wrong or offensive in any of my writing let me know immediately!! none of my trans bandom works are meant to be offensive or rude in any way!


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